Ghost Sign Story: The Butcher, The Baker, The Soda-Pop Maker

brick wall painted with faded advertisement for Tom Tucker ginger ale
A painted ghost sign for Tom Tucker “That dirty mother … lover” Southern-style Mint Ginger Ale, probably from the 1950s-60s, faded and worn but still holding on. Brighton Road, Perry South.

Blocked by a freestanding billboard for decades, the advertisement for Tom Tucker Southern-style Mint Ginger Ale may as well have been unearthed by archaeologists when it arrived out-of-the-blue a few years ago.

A person can still purchase Tom Tucker, but it won’t come in a 32-ounce green glass bottle anymore. Looking every bit the champagne of Southern-style mint ginger ales it is, the big bottle was painted directly onto a two-story brick wall of a row house along Brighton Road probably 60 or 70 years ago.

brick wall painted with faded advertisement for Coca-Cola
A solid investment. Coca-Cola ad still working today, Tarentum

We deal in ghosts, The Orbit. Ghosts of people that lived here, sure, but ghost houses too. There was an entire ghost neighborhood in Clairton until it disappeared completely. At some point we’ll get to our collections of ghost barbers, ghost taverns, and ghost pharmacies out to the world.

Ghost signs, though—the original “ghosts”! Advertising, from a time before billboards were as ubiquitous as they are now, was created by sign painters directly on the brick walls of buildings in prominent places. We’re lucky so many of them survive and—for the companies that persist, at least—one has to believe it was a solid investment to pay for one wall in 1960 and still have it working for them today.

We’ve got so many ghost sign photos in the backlog that we’re going to break up the collection into some themes. This week: food & drink edition. We’ll get to the other stuff soon.

Soda-Pop … and other beverages

brick wall painted with faded advertisement including glass bottles
(unknown) giant pop bottles with a family rightfully in awe, Uptown
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola, Sharpsburg
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for Coca-Cola
Duquesne Pharmacy / Coca-Cola, Duquesne
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for Squirt soda-pop
Kempler’s Deli Market / Squirt, Weirton, WV
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for RC Cola
Royal Crown Cola, Duquesne
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for long-gone dairy
Snee Bros. Dairy, Clairton
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for cold beer
Cold Beer, Monongahela [1]
faded ghost sign for long-gone liquor store
Cut Rate Liquor Store, Cumberland, MD
brick wall painted with very whiskey advertisement
(unknown) Whiskey, Ambridge

Junk Food Junkies

brick wall painted with many layers of faded advertisements
Yetter’s Chocolates, et al. Millvale
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for Clark candy bars
Clark Bar, Hill District [2]
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for potato chips
DeMiller’s Potato Chips, Larimer [3]

Flour Power

ghost sign for Bill's bar painted on brick wall
Bill’s Bakery, East Vandergrift
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for Gold Medal Flour
Henry Wer(?)’s Wholesale Liquor / Gold Medal Flour, Carrick
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for Gold Medal Flour
Gold Medal Flour, McKees Rocks
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for long-gone grocery store
(unknown—LaPollo?) Grocer / Mother’s Best Flour, Lawrenceville
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for Kuhn's grocery store
Kuhn’s Quality Foods, Perry Hilltop [4]
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for Mail Pouch tobacco
Kellar’s Groceries and Meats / Mail Pouch Tobacco, Lyndora
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for Lebanese food store
Mowad’s Mill City Inn, Lebanese Foods …, Aliquippa
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for long-gone grocery store
E. Sterling Groceries / “The Real Kind,” Sharpsburg
painted sign for Fiore's Home Dressed Meats on brick wall, Pittsburgh, PA
Fiore’s Home Dressed Meats, Larimer [5]
faded ghost sign for butcher painted on brick wall
(unknown) meats, Lawrenceville
brick wall painted with faded advertisement for W. Boehm Co.
W. Boehm Co. Grocer, Bloomfield [6]

Notes:

[1] Cox Distributing still sells cold beer from this location, but the style of sign painting and subsequent meter placement suggest this may be from an older business.

[2] While this Clark Bar ghost sign looks like some holy grail of the genre, Orbit readers informed us it was created for the film Fences which filmed in the Hill District in 2016.

[3] No, you can’t read the name DeMiller’s in this sign, but somehow astute Orbit reader Maggie Ess identified the building as home to the Keystone Potato Chip Co., 6635 Kelly Street, maker of DeMiller’s chips.

[4] Kuhn’s Quality Foods is still very much a going concern with eight stores in the region, but this brick building on Perrysville Ave. no longer hosts one of them.

[5] Reposted from our earlier story Looking for a Lost Little Italy in Larimer.

[6] Macaroni Etc! This W. Boehm Co. “Manufacturers of Mother’s and Excelsior egg noodles, macaroni, and spaghetti” ghost sign twofer was exposed only when a pair of row houses were demolished on Pearl Street in 2021.

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